We've done cannibal hillbilles, clowns (very unpopular with my crew, btw), and more but this year the crew wants to do...a torture chamber.

I'm wondering what the professionals of this site have found to be effective, or not effective, in this genre. What works?

Our haunt is titled the Torture Factory so I have some experience with this. The biggest challenge you will face is for most scenes you will need at least two actors: a torturer and a victim. So if youíre used to running a scene with one actor, youíll have to almost double your staff. Next, you torturers need to be big, tall actors. This gives them an intimidation factor over your patrons. Also donít only use females for your victims. You can also mix it up by having victims that have escaped and possibly over taken their captors and turned the tables on them. Be sure to use your victims to distract from another scare in the scene. Give them a good dialogue to interact with the patrons and then hit them with something they arenít expecting.

I appreciate the feedback. We should have 3-5 people in our scene every night. Our haunt is a little weird, a bunch of little groups get together and each one does a scene at a local museum like venue. Ours is in an amphitheater usually used for concerts, but we are building confining walls with cages. It's going to look sort of V shaped, and we are right after our vortex tunnel.

I actually bought a complete real torture chamber that someone found in their basement when they bought a house. Found best use was people came in from a tight side angle. All pieces behind bars cause they were dangerous... so walking parallel to the dungeon and at the end had actors slam on a wall to their opposing side and the scarefactory wolves pounce up on the table from the other... worked really good until the wolves welds broke in 6 spots and mouth and feet pieces broke off mid season.
I had no actors in the dungeon so it was atmosphere until the final scares.